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Like for example, watching Greg make drinks where he challenges himself to highlight the existing ingredients in a drink, use the best version of them that he can, make them look good without hiding any of them in embarrassment, and make an incredible final synthesis. It's like Chopped. This is a lot of what I try to do, in a different medium. That often results in good engineering, but it would be weird to call the process or motivation "engineering."
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Wait what's cursed about git? The only cursed thing I know is mergetool, and can you figure out a better way to fix merge conflicts? I sure can't!
Git does have fundamental data model problems, for instance packing (obviously) restructures the files, so they take extra long to fetch after being repacked. And a data model that could handle partial fetches without a lot of crazy stuff under the table would be nice. But all the visible stuff you use is just... clone, pull, add, commit. Maybe push.
Ah, I don't recall git back in the day. I might have been a late adopter.
I've mentioned before that another thing I take inspiration from is the speedrunning community. I think the way to do *good* abstractions, which all software should be, a lot of that is finding the right seam lines, and the most useful way I've found to think about this is:
"Could I rewrite this in an afternoon, adequately and accurately?"
Sometimes it takes a few tries to figure out the right lines, but that's in good synergy with the entire exercise of rewriting in constrained scope.
@MaddieM4 I've tried to learn git, taken classes, read books, and I still struggle with it.
I think part of it is the same reason I could only get so far with math, I'm not very good at programming, and since you mention speedrunning, why I'm not good at a lot of games where that kind of optimization pays off. I imagine there's some common quality of being good at certain sorts of abstract reasoning where my brain just halts the way a horse will balk at a suspicious looking patch of ground.
@foolishowl git's interface is a bit hostile and inconsistent, so don't feel too bad about that.
I do feel a kind of curiosity where I have to be careful not to interrogate you, but making programming accessible to the widest possible audience is a thing I care about, so I do instinctively want to know what the tricky bits are that trigger horse mode 😅 Seriously though, don't worry about humoring that curiosity unless you're comfortable to do so.
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Git, to me, is an example of a near miss, where it's Actually Good to highlight the fundamental data model (Merkle trees of files, commits tying them to metadata and history themselves being signed immutable artifacts, branches being mutable pointers into the CAS) but a lot of the porcelain on top is cursed.
The challenge is to be proud of the pieces, not add so much on top that they get lost, while still increasing the operator's leverage in a way that is itself humble and brief and explicable.
A lot of abstraction (and information hiding rhetoric) is writing off the idea that this is possible, and wallowing in shame about your ingredients.